We don't know how OpenMW will react to high poly count animated models, let alone a lot at the same time.

It would be interesting to simulate 100 in one scene, all fighting each other and measuring performance for: low, medium and high poly counts. I'm going to assume that we are more limited by CPU here than GPU, so poly count doesn't matter that much.

Fixed up the shading and capped off the gaps. It looks decent in-game so far, I think. I tried replacing the parts in Skins.nif file in the example template that psi29a posted a while back, but it seems to be set up in a different way and I can't find any decent tutorials for working with NIFs, so I'm writing that off as a lost cause for the moment. Finding any information on how to do these things is like pulling teeth from an exceptionally ornery alligator, so if somebody knows of a decent noob-to-pro Morrowind modding tutorial, help a brother out. Otherwise, I'm just going to pump out assets and the rest of you can make sense of them.

DtD on IRC wrote:I hope you´re not spending too much time on the female model.

I'm not, but why do you say that? If there's something you want me to know, I'd prefer if you'd say what it is. I can only get things done if I know what's going on.

And while I'm waiting for OSU to get back to me about the mocap files, I figured I'd make a rig. It's a modified version of the MakeHuman armature (I forget which one), so it fits perfectly with my current model, and I added IK solvers to make walking easier and a jaw bone for opening and closing the mouth. Is there a use for an eye tracking bone? If so, I can add one.

Regarding skins. nif. You need to cut your model into pieces, then rig it with your skeleton (not animated yet). See that the pieces of your model have names just like in Moonboy model. Also, when I made Moonboy I kind of forgot Clavicles. Then in OpenMW-CS, you should be able to put replace skins.nif.

The female model seemed like more work to fix than necessary when you could have pulled up a random model that doesn´t act super weird in Blender 2.49.

johndh wrote:a jaw bone for opening and closing the mouth. Is there a use for an eye tracking bone? If so, I can add one.

Looking at vanilla Morrowind models, there is no jaw bone. Rather, the mouth sections have a hole between the lips and the talking animation is somehow done by the engine, I think. Eye tracking is nonexistent, but NPCs turn their head to whatever NPC/player comes near them. Again, engine magic.

At least that´s what little sense I can make from looking at the models. Maybe Zini/Scrawl can confirm.

Can somebody take a look at this and see if they can get it to fit in the engine? If you can, tell me what you did. I don't know if the bones or vertex groups have to be named anything in particular, or if they have to match some kind of convention, so that's one thing to look out for. Or maybe if somebody has a copy of the Blender files for Moonboy, I could compare?

I think it looks okay in NIFskope, but I don't really know what I should be looking for, and I don't know where to go from there to get it working in the ES.

Also, high-poly version is just about done. All that really remains is a few minutes worth of modeling tweaks, then all of the animations, and I'd like to wait until I get a response about the mocap before I hit that too hard.

DestinedToDie wrote:Wow, sounds like amazing progress.

psi29a wrote:Like DestinedToDie said, this is amazing progress!

I do what I do when I do what I do.

DestinedToDie wrote:
Regarding skins. nif. You need to cut your model into pieces, then rig it with your skeleton (not animated yet). See that the pieces of your model have names just like in Moonboy model. Also, when I made Moonboy I kind of forgot Clavicles. Then in OpenMW-CS, you should be able to put replace skins.nif.

I tried replacing Skins.nif but I just get an invisible character, so I'm missing something important.

The female model seemed like more work to fix than necessary when you could have pulled up a random model that doesn´t act super weird in Blender 2.49.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. All I had to do was chop it up into pieces, which I would have had to do with any other model.

DestinedToDie wrote:
Looking at vanilla Morrowind models, there is no jaw bone. Rather, the mouth sections have a hole between the lips and the talking animation is somehow done by the engine, I think.

DestinedToDie wrote:My advice is to unpack the Morrowind BSA and view base_anim files in Nifskope to get an idea of how to make it work in the engine.

The NIF files in there look even more like gibberish. None of the *_skins.nif files even have an entire body, which suggests that they're somehow loaded on top of some sort of base that I can't find anywhere. base_anim.1st.nif is the closest to what I'm looking for, but it still doesn't indicate how to get from point A to point Z. The closest I've gotten so far is something that looks fine in NIFskope but is a jumbled mess of disorganized parts in OMW.

I´m trying to throw you all the bones I dug up when making Moonboy animations. Look at anim_base1st.nif in Nifskope. As you can see, there is a skeleton with rigged cubes and rectangles. The skeleton bones are all named "bip01 something". The cube/rectangles are named "Tri something". "Tri Chest", for example. You need to make an anim_base1st where you have a mesh attatched you the skeleton named "Tri Chest". Then you need to go to your female model´s chest and name her chest "Tri Chest". I believe both of them having the same name is where the connection is made and engine puts FemaleChest.nif and anim_base1.nif together based on that matching name.